Otras notas

This image was inspired by the "escudos" or heraldic coats-of-arms on castles and manor houses in Spain and Portugal that were symbols of powerful families. These families defended their towns and cities from attack. The idea is that a "bulletproof" decision support tool can provide protection from government Medicare audits.

The CDS will also provide protection from patient harm - the current system fails 500 times per day, resulting in preventable medical errors that lead to death.

The target audience is 65,000 outpatient physical therapists in the United States who are expected to transition to electronic medical records in the next ten years.

Clinical decision support (CDS) is a very specific feature of electronic medical records that is currently only used by the most sophisticated users, such as hospitals and academic medical centers.

The Bulletproof CDS will bring a simple, web-based solution to a group of user who provide an essential service but have fewer resources and less technology than the big boys.

The snake in the lower left panel is the copyrighted design of the Institute of Medicine (seen at http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?rec…42&page=R3. The snake is an ancient symbol of knowledge and is meant to represent evidence based medicine.

The lower right panel is a digitized image of a face scanned using face recognition software. This software uses algorithms to simplify recognition of complex patterns.

The upper left is an electrical discharge meant to symbolize artificial intelligence used in some expert systems.

The upper right is an ant. The ant is a symbol of the "hive mind" that demonstrates the power of distributed networks using simple rules to create complex and durable systems.

Physical therapists are a conservative group who are, collectively, behind the eight ball when it comes to the adoption of electronic medical records and computerized decision support. This "classic" escudo/emblem is meant to soothe their anxiety while showing them "modern" symbols they will trust and rely on.